Can openwrt be installed on a USB drive on a rpi3b+?
I've downloaded the image for the rpi 3b+ and dd'd it to a USB drive but it doesn't boot. It gets past the rainbow screen and then starts the usual process of booting, gets as far as looking at sda 0,0,0,0 but stalls there.
Is the image designed to be installed onto sd card only? My sd card slot is damaged so can only boot from USB. I was on the verge of webmin but I'm a big fan of openwrt.
Is this a non-starter or might one of you happy chappies know a route to getting openwrt installed on a USB drive on a rpi3b+?
It is possible to mod the firmware of RPi to boot from USB device (even SSD via USB) on debian/arch, so I would imagine that would also apply to OpenWRT, but I don't know of any ready-to-go versions.
Have a look here for some pointers - but you'll have to build your own version
Flash the OpenWrt "factory" image to the USB drive the same way you would an SD card. Mount the drive on a PC and edit file cmdline.txt in the boot partition to change the root device from mmcblk0p2 to sda2. Plug it into a Pi having its bootloader upgraded to one that USB boots and it should boot.
This sounds promisting. I'll give this a go tomorrow and see what happens! I currently have the pi running pretty well with iptables, pihole and playsms which is quite nice. However, it's not without its faults. I will test this and report back!
I can confirm the method of editing cmdline.txt and replacing mmcblk0p2 with sda2 worked just fine.
I'd like to add, that the initial steps to get this up and running as an AP with a 4g Dongle, took a little bit of thought:
Create a hotspot with your smartphone.
Connect to phone with laptop over wifi.
Share Wifi to Ethernet port on laptop.
Connect RaspberryPi to laptop ethernet port.
Install additional software as defined in corresponding wiki article (NCM for me)
Configure interfaces as you would see fit.
Sorted. Raspberry Pi acting as a wireless router, cheap as chips.
Thanks all for your input and mk24 for the solution.
Next I must see if there's a way I can send/receive SMS as that's the only thing I will miss, as I started using PlaySMS in the time between my OP and now.